Grosse Pointe Buff
By TalesOfSpike
Disclaimer: Spike, Buffy and all the other members of the Sunnydale crowd belong to Joss Whedon, UPN, Fox, and so on, and so on. Grosse Point Blank was written by Tom Jankiewicz, D V deVincentis, S K Boatman & the vastly talented John Cusack. It is of course owned by Hollywood pictures and Caravan Pictures and not me. I’m ripping them both off for no profit whatsoever, other than the happies I may get when and if you lovely people review.
Chapter 13
Buffy let Spike slip his hand into hers as they moved into the entrance hall. They hung back to one side to take in the scene before they made their way into the throng. Surprisingly little had changed since the days when Buffy used to wave her pom-poms. There had been token efforts made to make the hall less redolent of the boys' locker room and more like a dance. Crepe paper decorations were wound around the basketball hoops. Only every third row of fluorescents was lit, but whether the decoration committee were trying for intimate lighting, or whether they were trying to disguise some of the less pleasant aspects of the high school gym, was anyone's guess.
Eventually, they jostled each other into a position where they were confronted by the self-appointed "greeter" for the night.
"Welcome back, Dalesman. It's Nancy Doyle-Stevens."
Buffy and Spike responded to the insincere smiles of the girl Buffy vaguely remembered as teacher's pet in their English class.
"Hiii," answered Spike, if anything outdoing Nancy in the raging insincerity stakes. "How're you?" He had a funny feeling he'd now said more to the woman than he ever had in high school.
"I'm good."
"William," Spike responded automatically, knowing that the ID badges that were arrayed across the table wouldn't show his nickname. When the woman continued to look at him with a total lack of recognition, he added his surname to the introduction.
"Oh, William Blank." She began to sift through the badges in a particular area of the table. "Yes, there you are... Why you haven't changed a bit." As she passed the card over to Spike, he recognised his yearbook picture plastered over half the badge.
"Nice of you to say so, pet," Spike responded with a rakish grin.
"Hi, Buffy." The woman snatched a card from the table and thrust it into Buffy's hand. She must have had some sort of psychic positioning ability because Buffy could have sworn her eyes never left the table. "Just love your show," she continued in a tone that said she did anything but.
The corners of Buffy's mouth turned up while her eyes narrowed into a hard glare. "Oh thanks. Well, you're our demographic."
"I gather you got married, Nancy?" Spike tried to intervene before someone got cut on all the brittle.
"Why, yes, I did. And three children. It's really neat." Her tone brightened again as she spoke to Spike and Buffy began to wonder if Nancy particularly hated her, particularly liked Spike or if she just wasn't good with other women. Nancy continued on regardless, gesturing at one of the badges from the table. "I had the yearbook pictures put on so that everybody knows who everybody was."
"For special torture..." drawled Spike.
Nancy managed a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a dutiful laugh before she smiled at the couple behind Spike and Buffy and started all over again, intimating their audience was at an end. "Hi, It's Nancy Doyle-Stevens."
As Spike and Buffy moved away from the table she managed a ,"bye-bye, now, kids," before she took to persecuting the next arrivals.
"Who needs hard liquor?" Spike asked steering them toward the bar.
"Meeee," responded Buffy before enquiring after Spike. "How are you holding up?"
"A bit shaky," Spike admitted.
"Okay, straight to the bar for us."
"Y'know, I'm starting to remember some of these faces."
"What can I get ya?" the barman asked.
"Ehm, bourbon, rocks, double," said Spike, adding, "two," when he looked over at Buffy and she nodded.
"No problem," responded the barman turning away to fetch the drinks.
"So," asked Spike, "how long d'you think before we have to actually start relating to people?"
"Umm, soon, like nowish," supplied Buffy, since she had the advantage of being able to watch Scott Hope's approach by looking over Spike's shoulder.
"Hey, Buffy ...and Spike. I didn't recognise you from behind."
"Scott. How are you doing?"
"I'm in law. I've got my own practice down the bottom end of Main Street. It's a bit of a challenge covering everything, but in a one Starbucks town there isn't really room to specialise. Here, why don't you take this?" Scott held out a business card and then reassessed Spike's suit and drew his hand back. "Actually, I've got one here, for those special clients." He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a Mont Blanc pen, which he passed to Spike. "Don't forget to check the cap."
"I won't," said Spike as the bartender returned with his and Buffy's drinks. "Look, we're going to go circulate a bit, see who's here. We'll catch up with you later?" Spike suggested.
The blonde pair wandered off in search of more entertaining company. For the most part, the party reeked of desperation. You had the ex-high school princesses, desperate to prove that they were still as superior as ever. You had the former honour roll students who had big stars on their ID badges as if it were the things they had achieved by the age of eighteen that defined them. You had the former geeks with a point to prove because they couldn't just let their teenage humiliations go. There was the former chubby teenage girl, wearing a dress so short and tight it was almost obscene, just to prove that, now, she had the figure for it. All around the room people were desperately trying to pass themselves off as something better than they were, afraid that whatever their achievements they would be measured by their failures. If they had the money, they wanted the family. If they had the family, they wanted the career. People tried to impress people they'd barely even noticed in their high school years.
Finally, after a stream of passing encounters, where Spike avoided having to talk about himself by the simple expedient of pretending interest in everyone else, Buffy spotted Anya. "Hey, look, someone I actually used to know. I'm going to go catch up with Anya. Okay?"
Spike decided this was a good time to pay the bar a return visit, and got halfway there before Xander intercepted him. "Hey, Spike, man. How're you holding up there?"
"So-so, I think. How 'bout you?"
"Hey, I'd be in heaven... if I were a masochist. It's like taking all the rejections I got in three years worth of high school and squashing them into one fun-filled night of hell. So far I haven't even managed a dance."
"You sound like someone else in need of a drink." Spike resumed his progress with Xander in tow.
"Hey, Spike." Spike turned to be confronted by an attractive blonde he only vaguely remembered as a younger brunette.
"Hi, ...Aura," he managed. "How're you? You look good."
"Hey, Aura," Xander vied for the blonde's attention.
"You too. Nice suit," Aura admired Spike's sartorial elegance, ignoring Xander completely. "You learn to spot these things when you're in the trade."
"That's right. You're a model aren't you?" Spike tried to make polite conversation, rather than bring up her Depends commercials.
"It's Xander. Xander Harris. Remember we had about ten classes together...You were at my eighth birthday party..."
This last appeared to spark some recognition. "Eugh..." Aura made a face and backed off. "Well, maybe I'll catch up with you later, Spike," she threw in as a parting shot.
Spike looked over at Xander. "Remind me not to ask what happened at your eighth birthday party."
"You don't want to know, man. You don't want to know. Suffice to say Uncle Rory decided to pay a visit as the peppermint scented party clown."
"So, like, this is just a suggestion, but maybe the women who've been party to some of the most humiliating moments of your formative years aren't exactly going to be the ones you have the best chance of impressing."
"It's okay, Spike. I'm not looking to date my sister." Xander, typically, used humour as an emotional shield.
"Seriously, man. You don't need Aura Buckingham's approval. You've got that whole property development thing going. You're making a go of things. Stop trying so hard, and maybe you'll meet the right girl and things'll fall into place."
"And you're speaking from experience, here?"
"No, but then... there's only ever been one girl that I wanted." Spike's gaze travelled to the corner of the room before he made determined headway toward the bar.
~+~
Xander had, of course, gone off in search of further humiliations, and Spike decided to make his way to the bleachers at one side of the room for some quiet contemplation when he realised he had been called.
"Will?"
Spike turned, making his way to the table where the young tawny-blonde in the floral dress was sitting.
"Tara, pet. Where you been hiding?" Spike asked with a genuine smile.
"Right here, in full view. How are you?"
"I'm good. How you been?" Spike found his attention transfixed by the toddler on her knee.
"I'm good." She flashed her left hand toward Spike, showing a plain gold band. "I'm married to a wonderful woman."
"And?" Spike pointed a finger toward the baby.
"Robbie. He's adopted. There were other options, but it seemed right to give him the chance of a loving home."
"And how is it all. It's not all as easy as they tell you it's going to be, is it?"
Tara gave him a contented smile. "It's not easy, but it's great."
"Really?"
"Yeah. It's so great. People think that when you get married you lose your freedom."
"You don't?"
"No. It gets better and better. So how are you? How's your life?"
"In progress..." Spike answered with a wry grin, which in turn provoked a knowing smirk from the blonde opposite.
"Yeah?" She held the toddler out toward Spike. "Why don't you hold him for a minute while I get his bottle?"
"Wha'?"
"It's okay. He won't break. Go ahead." Spike held the baby with a nervousness born of unfamiliarity, but when the kid gave him a gummy grin, he seemed to settle right in to it.
"Y' know the first year you seem to spend all your time just making sure they're warm and fed and everything else they need to stay alive."
"Yeah, I'd imagine they'd be kinda vulnerable."
"Yeah." Tara pulled the bottle from one of her bags and watched, amused, as Spike mirrored the various expressions that crossed the toddler's face on being confronted with this new person-sized plaything.
Buffy paused at the edge of the dancefloor, watching the threesome as Tara passed the bottle to Spike, instructing him on how to hold it so that the baby wouldn't gulp down air along with the juice.
She strolled slowly toward the group. "Hey, Tara, last time I saw you, you were still waiting for this little guy. How're you coping? Must be pretty desperate if you're letting Spike watch him."
"Heyyy!" responded Spike, while Tara gave an enigmatic smile.
"Seems to me he's doing a pretty good job, for an amateur."
Buffy looked back and forward between the other two blondes. "D'you think it would be okay if I held him for a while?"
~+~
Half an hour later, Buffy and Spike found themselves on a balcony, looking down on the auditorium but isolated in the semi-darkness. From there, they could watch Riley, who had had a couple too many at the free bar, trying to pick up the ex-cheerleaders who had flocked round him in his high school days. They knelt side by side, on the floor in front of the first row of seats, with their arms on the ledge that ran around the edge of the gallery.
The music from below changed to a ballad, and Spike took the opportunity to speak, without shouting. "You know, I have recurring dreams about you. Five nights a week, for about six years, did I tell you?"
"No," answered Buffy. "No, I don't think you did. You know yesterday, on the radio..."
Spike smirked. "When you publicly humiliated me... I think I remember."
"Yeah, well, no more than you deserved. But, I think... maybe... I was kinda harsh, when I said you were broken."
"Yeah?" Buffy found herself staring into Spike's bottomless blue eyes. "So what's the current verdict?"
She let the corners of her mouth curl up just slightly. "I think... maybe broken goes a bit too far. I think that you're, say, mildly sprained or maybe really badly contused? Is that a word? But nothing that can't be fixed."
"For you, that's pretty much a compliment."
"Uh-huh." Stray curls swayed against the hollow of her cheeks as she slowly nodded her head.
"So, say, I didn't want to blow it, what should I say, now?"
"That you're glad you came back. That you're real happy to see me."
"Yeah. I am. I definitely am." Spike let his gaze scan Buffy's face for signs of doubt before he made his quiet apology. "I'm really sorry, if I buggered up your life."
Buffy smiled ruefully. "It's not over, yet." The two gazed into each other's eyes, the solemnity of where they were heading overcoming them both for a few seconds.
Finally, it was Buffy who broke the silence. "So, d'you have a wife down in Kentucky or somewhere?"
"Nope, not a one."
"Okay... In that case d'you want to dance?"
end of chapter 13